Everything in its place

Updated 4:10 pm, Friday, January 25, 2013

Karen Meade and her family stash items they grab every day in cubbies in the family's landing zone.

Karen Meade and her family stash items they grab every day in cubbies in the family's landing zone.

Photo: Edward A. Ornelas, San Antonio Express-News

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A valet tray on the landing zone at the Meade home holds keys, camera and sunglasses so they can be dropped coming in the door and picked up on the way out. A card case contains restaurant gift cards and coupons for dinners out.

A valet tray on the landing zone at the Meade home holds keys, camera and sunglasses so they can be dropped coming in the door and picked up on the way out. A card case contains restaurant gift cards and

File folders in the command center help Karen Meade keep her family of four organized.

File folders in the command center help Karen Meade keep her family of four organized.

Photo: Edward A. Ornelas, San Antonio Express-News

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The Meade family: Seth, 10, (from left) Evan, 13, Karen and Vance with the landing zone and command center in their home.

The Meade family: Seth, 10, (from left) Evan, 13, Karen and Vance with the landing zone and command center in their home.

Photo: Edward A. Ornelas, San Antonio Express-News

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Cubbies in the landing zone in the Meade home corral electronic devices, a container for coins and office supplies used most often.

Cubbies in the landing zone in the Meade home corral electronic devices, a container for coins and office supplies used most often.

Photo: Edward A. Ornelas, San Antonio Express-News

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Karen Meade of Let's Get Organizing created a system for organizing school keepsakes. A file drawer for each child and folders for each grade level keep the best of what children create in order.

Karen Meade of Let's Get Organizing created a system for organizing school keepsakes. A file drawer for each child and folders for each grade level keep the best of what children create in order.

Photo: Edward A. Ornelas, San Antonio Express-News

Everything in its place

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The half-dozen hanging file folders and dozen cubbies look simple and orderly. But they form the nerve center of Karen Meade's household.

Meade, a professional organizer and owner of Let's Get Organizing, calls the area in her breakfast room the command center and landing zone.

The two organizing stations, plus a school-keepsake storage system Meade created, add up to a trifecta of organizational bliss for families.

Landing zone

The landing zone is the first stop in the door for Meade, husband Vance and their sons, Seth, 10, and Evan, 13. It's also the last stop when they go out the door because that's where they've charged electronics and dropped keys, wallets and backpacks.

“It's simple. Simple is what people want,” Meade says.

She uses a shelf with cubbies that was given to her by her mother. But the landing zone could be a shelf or a sofa table, she points out. It just needs to be located near the door family members enter and leave the house.

It's a place to keep the things the family accesses almost daily. For Meade's family, that includes community cubbies with a jar where family members drop change and basic office supplies such as pens, pencils and tape. Each boy has a couple of cubbies for ongoing school projects and things they grab often, such as Evan's robotics binder and Seth's homework clipboard.

Her command center includes folders for receipts, directories, children's activities and daily and monthly tickler files.

“If I need something for Friday, I put it on Fridays. Every morning, I check the tickler file and there it is,” Hendrick says.

The Meade family's command center includes folders for each family member, a file for household projects and Karen's file of things to read.

“If I'm going to a doctor's appointment or the car-pool line, I can grab that file,” she says.

She might put reminder notes or important mail in her husband's folder. One son keeps his school directory in his command center folder. “When he needs to find an email address, he goes to that folder and, voila!”

School keepsakes

As a mom and former third-grade teacher, Meade values what children bring home from school. As an organizer — she's currently the vice president of the San Antonio chapter of the National Association of Professional Organizers — she understands how overwhelming all the papers can be.

“In homes with children, every mom struggles with what to do with children's keepsakes,” she says.

Her solution is to create a file drawer for each child with hanging folders for each school year, pre-K through senior year.

Her advice: “Be ruthless with what you keep. If it comes from a copy machine, it's not a keepsake.”

She works with her sons to decide what goes in the drawer. Ribbons, school pictures, self-portraits and report cards are keepers, along with other items that show creativity and growth.

“When I'm 70, I'm not going to say, “Vance, will you go get Seth's multiplication paper from the attic so I can look at it. That's not going to happen.”

She files in the folders each year, usually in summer. During the school year, the boys toss potential keepsakes in a basket that they sort together when it's filing time.